Fredrik Vaerslev

Fredrik Vaerslev was born in 1979 in Norway. Credible sources differ on the exact town, citing both Moss and Drobak, and no source supplies an exact birth date.

He studied at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, known as the Stadelschule, in Frankfurt am Main, where his professors included Michael Krebber, Willem de Rooij, and Simon Starling, and he completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Malmo Art Academy in 2010. His paintings grow out of everyday, often suburban materials and processes: industrial spray paint, tarpaulins, and canvases left outdoors so that weather and time become part of the finished surface. He is currently a professor at the Malmo Art Academy. He lives and works in Norway, with sources variously citing Drobak, Oslo, Drammen, and Vestfossen as his bases.

Institutional writing on Vaerslev consistently frames his practice as an inquiry into painting's process and materials rather than image making for its own sake, built from industrial spray paint, tarpaulins, and canvases weathered outdoors. The Neubauer Collegium's 2026 survey, his first institutional exhibition in the United States, was organized around the idea that his abstraction rewards close reading as much as looking. No outlet reviewed offered a short, exactly quotable critical line that could be verified verbatim, so this profile paraphrases institutional framing rather than quoting critics directly.

Vaerslev's public auction footprint is small relative to his museum profile. Artprice records roughly 160 auction appearances for the artist. MutualArt cites a market high of about USD 317,000 for a painting and USD 80,044 for a sculpture, though neither figure comes with a confirmed title, auction house, or sale date in the sources reviewed. HENI separately reports a three year auction high of about USD 11,100 for an Untitled work at Christie's. Phillips's own artist page lists results including USD 32,500 for Untitled (Terrazzo Painting), GBP 18,750 for Untitled (Canopy Painting), and GBP 17,500 for Lumiar Cite #2, again without full lot dates in the sources reviewed. No single sale traced in this research rises to the level of a confirmed, fully sourced all time record, so any auction high quoted elsewhere for this artist should be checked against a specific lot and sale date before it is relied on.

Vaerslev has no published catalogue raisonne, and authentication runs through his current galleries, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin, rather than through a scholarly catalogue or certificate program. His museum presence, spanning Oslo, Paris, Miami, Dijon, Malmo, and Stockholm, is unusually deep for a painter still in his forties, but his auction market remains thin, and the sources reviewed could not confirm a single, fully documented record sale. Anyone considering a purchase should confirm any quoted auction result against the underlying lot and sale date before relying on it, and should note that the artist's name appears in market databases both as Vaerslev and with the Norwegian ae spelling.